When Port-au-Prince learned of Graham’s challenge of a visit by him in return for freedom for the Baptistes, Paul Blanchet, the late Papa Doc’s longtime aide and Information Minister, responded with an anti-Greene editorial in his newspaper, Panorama: ‘The Incorrigible Graham Greene’. The broadside called Graham ‘facetious’ and ‘as extravagant as the novels he dreamed up’. The Port-au-Prince newspaper purported to be
convulsed with laughter at this latest joke of Greene. What a waste of talent. As a good Catholic he could have used it in a wiser crusade. But gallows humour isn’t enough for him. Nor nightmares. Nor the inspiration he affects of someone just back from hell. A mortal sin torments him. But the ‘rabid Catholic’ neglects to do penance for having written The Comedians. He is a sinner who loves good but does evil.
Panorama declared that Graham had ‘defied and denigrated Haiti, which he feels nostalgic about’. Echoing the government line, Le Matin, the Port-au-Prince daily, said Graham would be ‘mad with rage’ at the economic progress it claimed the Baby Doc regime was promoting in Haiti. However, Chamberlain noted in a reaction story published in the 25 May 1976 issue of the Guardian, ‘The exigencies of political discretion in Duvalierist Haiti … prevented the paper from telling the reader what the author [Greene] had demanded.’
Graham wrote to me on the same day, ‘I am glad to see that I am not forgotten in Port-au-Prince … My interview with the American Press got through to them … and there’s a little attack on me in the local paper.’
In September 1965 when the Dominican civil war ended, Fred and his Haitian combatants had to flee the country. We managed to aid Fred and Renel Baptiste with clothes and money. Together with Gerard Lafontant, they departed for Belgium and eventually moved to Paris where the Baptiste brothers joined Lieutenant Sean Pean, a former Haitian military academy instructor, who was top of his academy class of 1956. In Europe, Fred Baptiste began seeking funds for what he termed ‘his’ revolution. Along with Lieutenant Pean he visited Graham in Antibes during the filming of the film version of The Comedians. Graham introduced them to the cast, and Fred pleaded for funds from them. Peter Glenville told them he had already contributed generously to Father Georges for the Haitian revolution.
In his letters to me from Paris, Fred Baptiste spoke of his frustration but also of his determination to continue his fight. In early 1969 Fred and Renel were arrested upon their return to Santo Domingo. They were in possession of false passports. Fred was later released, but some of his old Kamoken still living in the Dominican Republic had been rounded up and jailed. It was suspected that President Balaguer’s well-organized secret service had let Baptiste go for the express purpose of learning more about his intentions.
Then, on 24 February 1970, an article in the Washington Star datelined from Port-au-Prince by Jeremiah O’Leary reported that the Baptiste brothers had returned to Haiti.
The two leaders of the anti-Duvalierist group had been in custody until recently … Evidently Balaguer, who had troubles of his own with a presidential election coming up in May, was anxious to convey to Duvalier that the Dominicans were not responsible for helping the rebels cross the frontier. The Communist band is led by Fred and Renel Baptiste, who are brothers and who took an active part in the Dominican civil war of 1965 on the side of the leftist rebels.
Fred Baptiste went into hiding when he was released on bail and Dominican authorities subsequently learned that he was gathering men and arms. Last week, Santo Domingo intelligence officials say, the brothers plus seven other armed men made their way into Haiti in the vicinity of Jimanf in the south. Evidently hoping to round up the Baptiste band quickly, Duvalier has not announced to his people that they are in the country. The Dominicans similarly have not made public disclosure about the incursion. The Baptistes are tough and well trained. In the past their small group has accepted financial assistance from Fidel Castro and Moscow.
Precisely how the Baptiste brothers ended up in Papa Doc’s hands remains a mystery, but it was believed that they were arrested and handed over by President Balaguer to the Haitian authorities.
Papa Doc had decided their fate in 1970: the Baptiste brothers should rot to death in Fort Dimanche. They did. Fred died on 16 June 1974. He was forty-one. His corpse was reportedly dragged from his cell and dumped near the sea to rot and be eaten by dogs. Renel, who was thirty-five, died on 19 July 1976. Both were said to have contracted tuberculosis, and Fred had become insane.
Curiously, O’Leary had described the Baptistes as Communists. In 1964 they had been given a clean bill of health by the CIA as non-Communists. It was only later revealed that Fred Baptiste, in his quest to find funds for his revolution, had become a quasi-Maoist and had travelled to China during the Cultural Revolution. There are various versions of whether in fact Red China supplied Fred Baptiste with funds and, if they did, whether they were stolen. It is true that at the time of his death Fred was left with only a Maoist cap, which he had worn proudly in Paris.
Graham wrote their epitaph in the Daily Telegraph magazine on 12 March 1976. ‘I am proud to have had Haitian friends who fought courageously in the mountains against Doctor Duvalier … They were patriots, simple men, not from the elite. Unlike many exiles, they were brave enough to go back and fight the Duvaliers on their home ground.’
I had just completed my work on a Time cover story on the Panama Canal and the treaty negotiations when Time assigned me to cover the last leg of a twelve-day mission to the long-neglected Caribbean by President Carter’s UN Ambassador Andréw Young. In Venezuela I joined Young and his entourage. While most of the journey was dedicated to spreading Jimmy Carter’s gospel of goodwill, Haiti was to be the exception. Ambassador Young had an important human rights message for Baby Doc that the US envoy intended to be loud and clear.
When I had first heard of Young’s trip I asked Georges Salomon, Haiti’s Ambassador to the United States, to ask Jean-Claude Duvalier whether he had any objection to my visiting Haiti with Young, even though I was still officially persona non grata. Salomon reported back that Jean-Claude had no objections. However, when I arrived in Santo Domingo with Ambassador Young’s delegation to spend the night prior to flying on to Haiti, an official from the local US embassy placed my bags to one side, explaining that I was not going to Haiti. When Young heard what the embassy official said, he became angry. ‘You are going with us,’ Young assured me. The US embassy in Santo Domingo was instructed to notify the US ambassador in Port-au-Prince to advise the Palace. I was coming back to Haiti.
US embassy officials in Haiti were visibly irritated by my presence and complained to their colleagues in Santo Domingo, and later to me personally, about the many trips they had to make to the National Palace to gain entry for a newsman who was — in diplomatic protocol terms — officially unwelcome. Nevertheless they had a stubborn human-rights advocate on their back. Young was determined to see that I returned to Haiti for the first time in fourteen years. In retaliation, the Palace was placed off-limits to all the media, and Young’s entire news entourage was, according to a furious State Department official, prevented from covering the meeting between Duvalier and Young at the Palace.
My problems aside, it turned out Ambassador Young’s 24-hour visit to Haiti saved the lives of at least 104 political prisoners. A general amnesty and the release of many political opponents followed the US envoy’s quiet lecture to Baby Doc Duvalier. Young was respected in Haiti because he had marched with Martin Luther King Jr, and a speech Young made from the steps of the old plantation-style US ambassador’s residence, overlooking Port-au-Prince, was remarkably plain-spoken.
Young recalled the United State’s own tortuous civil-rights history, and while professing that he had no intention of telling Haiti how to run its internal affairs he made clear that Haiti’s human-rights record would in large part set the tone of relations between the two countries, particularly the amount of US aid. He cautioned the Baby Doc regime to take some sailing lessons from Washington. ‘When pe
ople understand the way the winds are blowing, they trim their sails accordingly,’ Young said, emphasizing that the prevailing wind blowing out of Washington was in support of human rights.
Jean-Claude Duvalier must have felt that wind because later at the Palace, when Young handed Duvalier a list of Haitian political prisoners prepared by Amnesty International, Baby Doc promised the prisoners would be freed, at least in cases that did not involve serious crimes of violence. That was a major caveat since presumably any political prisoner could be so accused. Still, Duvalier added that his regime, which had long exercised unlimited powers of arrest, was preparing to announce habeas corpus guarantees — previously unheard-of in Duvalier-era Haiti. Haitians were impressed with Young’s visit. Eleven of the 104 political prisoners released were expelled from the country as so-called ‘terrorists’, too dangerous, Baby Doc’s government said, to be left on domestic soil. One of the released prisoners said of his fellow inmates, ‘Those who lived were the ones who nurtured the flame of hope. Those who died were the ones who gave up. A man who decided he couldn’t live didn’t.’
I was excited at the prospect of obtaining firsthand news about the fate of the Baptiste brothers. It was just possible, I hoped, that if they were still alive Ambassador Young could obtain their release. Unfortunately, I was wrong.
The question that was to haunt both Graham and me was whether we could have done more to save the Baptiste bothers. Had we pressured the regime earlier, might they have been released? If Fred had been released to the local insane asylum, only a few miles from the prison, at least he would not have rotted away like forgotten garbage in Fort Dimanche.
According to prison survivors, both of the Baptiste brothers were carried out, like other victims, wrapped in the traditional Fort Dimanche shroud, the lice-infested straw mats that had been their beds for all those years. The fellow inmates pressed into service to handle the corpses were careful not to remove them head first, as Haitian superstition says that if a dead person is removed the wrong way (head first) from a room, the other occupants are sure to follow the corpse to the grave.
Jean-Claude Duvalier permitted me back again in 1980 and granted a three-hour interview. He had just wed the divorcee Michele Bennett, and the story I reported appeared in Time’s Hemisphere edition. From then on I visited Haiti regularly, observing the forces of change evolve. In early December 1985 I predicted that the political end was near for Jean-Claude.
My photographer son Jean-Bernard and I attended the January Independence Day church service at the cathedral in Port-au-Prince. Although we were both arrested, the events proved us right. The service was to be the last public ceremony for the young couple and the last full-dress parade of the Duvalier dynasty’s hated thugs, the Tontons Macoutes. The popular revolt succeeded, and on 7 February 1986 Duvalier fled.
Far from improving the disastrous situation, the succession of self-serving and authoritarian neo-Duvalierist ‘interim’ governments further undermined ideals and provoked even greater misery and hardship. In the aftermath, Haitians faced greater duress. Corruption, thievery and state terrorism had become institutionalized under the Duvaliers as had the drug trade. Greed had become a creed. An entire generation of Haitians sought to imitate their role models, the super-ministers who practised grand larceny on a grand scale.
Yet even as Duvalierist thugs both within and without the army, commanded by General Henry Namphy, roamed the streets, wreaking their savagery at will — evidenced by the massacre of thirty-four voters on a bloody November election day in 1987 — the Haitian people persevered in their non-violent struggle. From the depths of their anti-Duvalierist, anti-politician feelings they chose a different destiny. In overwhelming numbers they turned out to elect Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an ambitious 37-year-old Roman Catholic priest, to the presidency. Aristide had waged a campaign based on his public opposition to Duvalierism, and his platform had been simple and what the people who mistrusted politicians wanted most: justice and transparency. His was a movement of hope, and the little priest-turned-prophet won the most democratic election in Haiti’s history.
But the Haitian people’s hope for change brought only more of the same. With the former priest, the people’s hope was once again tragically dashed, as he, too, proved to be just another politician whose use of violence as an instrument of power harked back to Papadocracy.
Graham continued to be prophetic in writing about Haiti. In one of his last letters to me, on 20 November 1990, he predicted that if Father Aristide won the presidential election ‘he wouldn’t survive long’. Aristide lasted only seven months in office before he was overthrown and the Haitian military assumed power once again. That bloody coup of September 1991 and the repression that followed the ousting of Father Aristide from office triggered an unprecedented flood of boat people trying to escape Haiti. More than forty thousand were intercepted at sea by the United States Coast Guard; unknown numbers of others drowned. Thousands were imprisoned at the US naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba.
During a 1992 hearing in Washington, DC, US Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, obviously displeased with the policy of then President George Bush of summarily returning Haitian boat people without determining their refugee status, asked a US Justice Department lawyer, ‘Have you ever been to Haiti?’
She answered, ‘No, your honour. I’m sorry. I have not.’
Justice Blackmun asked, ‘Are you familiar with a book called The Comedians by Graham Greene?’
‘No, your honour. I’m not.’
Blackmun then told the attorney, ‘I recommend you read it.’
In a sense Graham Greene’s influence over the fate of Haiti will endure. The reason why is perhaps best explained in a passage at the end of The Comedians, reflecting the eternal struggle between good and evil, darkness and light and the plight of humankind — caught in the middle — in trying to cope and choose. The young exile priest — Bajeux — preaches a short sermon based on an exhortation by St Thomas the Apostle, ‘Let us go up to Jerusalem and die with him’.
The Church is in the world, it is part of the suffering in the world, and though Christ condemned the disciple who struck off the ear of the high priest’s servant, our hearts go out in sympathy to all who are moved to violence by the suffering of others. The Church condemns violence, but it condemns indifference more harshly. Violence can be the expression of love, indifference never. One is an imperfection of charity, the other the perfection of egoism. In the days of fear, doubt and confusion, the simplicity and loyalty of one apostle advocated a political solution. He was wrong, but I would rather be wrong with St Thomas than right with the cold and the craven.
PART II
On the Way Back: Graham Greene in Central America
11 | A DICTATOR WITH A DIFFERENCE
In December 1971, on my return from covering the third anniversary of a military coup in Panama, I wrote enthusiastically to Graham about a different breed of Latin American dictator, Brigadier General Omar Torrijos Herrera. This heretic populist Panamanian strongman, then forty-one years old, was struggling with Washington, demanding a new treaty for the Panama Canal. If peaceful negotiations failed, he hinted that violence was in the offing. For foreign correspondents the story had the stereotypical ingredients: an underdog ‘banana republic’ challenging Uncle Sam and a charismatic caudillo. But, more sub-stantively, Torrijos’s challenge was a major policy issue for Washington that would not only affect the fifty thousand Americans living in the Panama Canal Zone but touched a nostalgic and proud nerve in the American people. The strategic Panama Canal had been the young United States’ greatest engineering feat. It likewise symbolized American hegemony in the hemisphere. The spirit of Teddy Roosevelt was still alive in the United States, particularly among ‘Zonians’ on the isthmus. On the other hand, Panama’s 1.3 million citizens, along with most Latin Americans, if not all, were sympathetic to Torrijos’s cause. Instinctively, I knew that Graham and the General would get along.
During
possibly the largest rally ever in Panama City, held on II October 1971 to mark the third anniversary of Torrijos’s revolution, I had noticed how ill at ease he was when speaking in public. Yet the enthusiasm of the thousands that crowded into Plaza Cinco de Mayo was not the ritual cheering of a rent-a-crowd; he didn’t have to buy their emotions. Their love affair with the charismatic general was genuine. Torrijos had given them a new sense of national pride.
Absent was the clutch of politicos whose ambitions and perquisites he had upset. Most of the rabiblancos — white tails (wealthy members of the upper class whose nickname comes from a white-tailed songbird) — didn’t like his populist rhetoric. He was the butt of their jokes at the elite Union Club. Torrijos was a graduate of the Salvadoran Military Academy. He was a country boy without a university degree. Still, he was a shrewd, wily negotiator with a folksy intuition. He had an unusual ability to coin one-liners that provided slogans for his political battles, and he spoke in parables steeped in rural logic.
That day, in 1971, in a neat white dress uniform, Torrijos was obviously uncomfortable in his role. But once he launched into his speech his emotions took over and his voice rang strong with conviction. He had provided the slogan for the banners, ‘‘Nunca de rodillas (‘Never on our knees’), and he wanted the US administration of President Richard Nixon to take notice. The crowd roared ecstatically.
There were tense moments when it appeared his words might trigger an assault on the American Zone on the other side of the fence behind the crowd. ‘What people can bear the humiliation of seeing a foreign flag planted in the very heart of its nation?’ Torrijos demanded. The people’s patience, he warned, had limits; their anger could be directed at the Zone, and ‘we’ were prepared to die. However, unlike the riots of 1964 when the Panama National Guard was nowhere to be seen, Torrijos had taken the precaution of stationing guardsmen with orders to halt any movement towards the Zone. The only thing to die that day was my story. Without a riot there was no interest from Time’s editors in New York.
The Seeds of Fiction Page 20
